Open thread: Ayn Rand

Posted on January 10, 2009 by Walter Olson

Since one of the ongoing comment threads has gotten into a discussion of Ayn Rand, since she was in the blogs a lot this week because of this Stephen Moore article for the WSJ, and since few if any intellectual figures have done as much to shape the secular right in modern America, let’s make her the topic of a (polite, civil) open thread.

Rand famously did not want opposition to organized religion to be regarded as one of the defining aspects of her thinking, not because she was the slightest bit apologetic about her stand, but simply because other battles interested her more. As one writer notes, she aimed her fire on numerous occasions at pronouncements of the Roman Catholic hierarchy and the Vatican, while saying little that was specific to Protestantism (or Eastern Orthodoxy, Judaism, Islam, etc.). At any rate, some resources on Rand’s views of religion and faith can be found here, here, here, and (video) here.

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Orthodoxy vs. Conservatism

Posted on January 9, 2009 by David Hume

In light of Richard John Neuhaus’ comment about orthodoxy, I thought I would quote a bit from a piece I posted earlier from Jerry Muller on conservatism & orthodoxy:

The orthodox theoretician defends existing institutions and practices because they are metaphysically true: the truth proclaimed may be based on particular revelation or on natural laws purportedly accessible to all rational men. The conservative theoretician defends existing institutions above all because they are thought to have worked rather well and been conducive to human happiness. For the conservative, the historical survival of an institution or practice —be it marriage, monarchy, or the market—creates a prima facie case that it has served some human need. For conservatives, the very existence of institutions and traditions creates a presumption that they have served some useful function. In addition, conservatives tend to be acutely sensitive to the costs of radical change. Elimination or radical reconstruction of existing institutions may lead to harmful, unintended consequences, conservatives argue, because social practices are interlinked, such that eliminating one will have unanticipated negative effects on others….

Thus, although orthodox and conservative thinkers may sometimes reach common conclusions, they reach those conclusions by different intellectual routes.

[my emphases]

My own participation in Secular Right is understood in light of my perception that the “orthodox” outlook, broadly understood, has bled into modern American conservatism.  Of course, orthodoxy is not simply a feature of conservatism, there are plenty of orthodoxies which are operationally accepted as if they were of metaphysical import on the American Left as well.

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Richard John Neuhaus, cont’d

Posted on January 9, 2009 by Walter Olson

Damon Linker has blog posts up at New Republic here and here, drawing a reply from Ross Douthat (earlier from Bradlaugh).

I find this paragraph from National Catholic Reporter very puzzling:

From the early 1970s forward, Neuhaus was a key architect of two alliances with profound consequences for American politics, both of which overcame histories of mutual antagonism: one between conservative Catholics and Protestant Evangelicals, and the other between free market neo-conservatives and “faith and values” social conservatives.

The first half of this pair of ideas is obviously well-founded: Neuhaus’s cooperation with figures like Charles Colson was indeed instrumental in getting conservative Catholics and evangelicals to overlook some of their differences in the greater interest of a united front against secularism, cultural modernity, and other enemies. But it would never have occurred to me to call him (as opposed to, say, the late William F. Buckley, Jr.) “a key architect of [the alliance] between free market neo-conservatives and ‘faith and values’ social conservatives”. Leaving aside what is meant by the overpacked portmanteau “free market neo-conservatives”, the general alliance being referred to predated Neuhaus’s conversion to conservatism and grew weaker, rather than stronger, during his period of maximum influence. I can see making an argument that he was a central figure in undermining that alliance, in that he devoted unceasing effort to shifting the focus of conservatism from causes that provided obvious common ground with free-market advocates (like, say, limiting the scope of government) to that of culture war, where the common ground is, let’s face it, a lot more limited. But maybe there’s some case — perhaps relating to his work in Eastern Europe? — for why conservatives of a free-market secular stripe should also be grateful for his career.

National Review’s editorial treatment, by the way, pays tribute to Neuhaus’s facility for Chesterton-style aphorism, giving as an example:

“Whenever orthodoxy becomes optional, it will sooner or later be proscribed.”

I’d say that ranks with top-drawer Chesterton. It is pithy and funny; it is obviously, flagrantly wrong as applied to the world most of us live in; it is, nonetheless, fruitful to think about as an aphorism; and most of the readers who smile at its wit will not take the time to consider where its logical implications lead.

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God against the gods

Posted on January 8, 2009 by David Hume

In Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799-1914 the author notes that militant secularism during the 19th century in France was a feature of the Metropole. In contrast, the French Church was always the privileged handmaid of Empire no matter the orientation of the political faction in power. The reality of this ad hoc case-by-case arrangement shows that principles collapse even for the famous a priori French when faced with reality which demands pragmatism. A few days ago I was pointed to an article in The New Republic which had me thinking of this, Enemy’s Enemy: Evangelicals v. Muslims in Africa. From the piece:

Evangelicals are hardly persecuted in Uganda today–if anything, under Museveni, evangelical Christianity has a governmental imprimatur. But resentments dating back to the Amin era still fester, and they are exacerbated by the growth of Islam in Africa. Ssempa and other evangelicals frequently complained to me about how Middle Eastern Muslim states are pumping money into African proselytizing. Though Muslims comprise only 16 percent of the Ugandan population, foreign largesse gives Muslim students an edge when it comes to education, Ssempa claimed. What he’s doing, he said, is trying to right the balance. “There is a race,” he said angrily. “Islam is also racing for the soul and mind of the Africans.”

In the competition between evangelical Protestants and Muslims all things equal there is no deep thought required as to my personal preference; Islam as a whole stands opposed to the West, and America in particular. African Christians may have their own resentments against the West, but the tie of Christian civilization at least serves as a potential cultural bridge. Obviously, not so with Islam. To be fair, my own preference would be that institutionally more elaborate churches, such as Roman Catholicism, Anglicanism or Presbyterianism, were waxing as opposed to evangelicals of a Pentecostal tinge; not only are these churches less irrationally superstitious, but their more top-down structure formalizes West-the Rest ties.  But there is no option that I can see for any robust secularist movement predicated on a thin naturalistic understanding of the world in Sub-Sarahan Africa.  

This does not mean that I favor the activities of evangelicals in all circumstances.  In much of the Middle East prosyletization by evangelicals is not helpful, not least to local Christian groups who have established a modus vivendi with the Muslim majorities who always view them suspiciously.  This does not mean that I do not prefer that Iran, for example, should be evangelical as opposed to Muslim, or that I would disagree with the notion that in the civilized world the option of personal choice in religion and free witnessing is a rather fundamental right.  The former is unlikely, and the latter is irrelevant, because Iran is not truly part of the civilized world from a Western perspective.

Posted in culture | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Unfit to Serve

Posted on January 8, 2009 by Bradlaugh

Ron Guhname, who blogs as “Inductivist,” and knows his way round all the GSS and polling data, has dug up an interesting result from the World Values Survey.

The pollsters asked respondents in 60-odd countries if they agreed that an atheist is unfit for high public office. With “most strongly agree” at number one (it’s Pakistan), the U.S.A. ranked 19th.

Posted in culture | 21 Comments

Going to school v. going to church

Posted on January 8, 2009 by Heather Mac Donald

The teen birth rate has started climbing again. As usual, it’s highest in red states and states with high black and Hispanic populations and lowest in New England blue states. In 2006, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas topped the list, with 68, 64, and 63 births for every 1000 female teens, respectively, compared to 19 births per 1000 female teens in New Hampshire and 21 in Vermont and Massachusetts.

Will more religion cure this scourge? Not by itself. Mexican-American teens have the highest birth rate—93 births per 1000 girls—compared to 64 births per 1000 black girls and 26 births per 1000 white girls. Decadent secular Europe and non-Christian Asia lag far behind. In 2003, Japan’s teen birthrate was 3.9 births per 1000 girls. Italy’s rate was 6.9 per 1000, and France’s, 10 births per 1000 girls.

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Richard John Neuhaus

Posted on January 7, 2009 by Bradlaugh

Richard John Neuhaus is apparently near death.   Most of what I know about the man comes from his starring role in Damon Linker’s 2006 book Theocons.  The rest is three or four encounters at conservative functions, when he seemed cordial enough.   I subscribed to First Things for a while when I was still a churchgoer, but never found much of interest in it and let the subscription lapse after a couple of years.  I do recall that famous 1991(?) essay arguing that an atheist couldn’t be a good citizen.  (Though IMS Neuhaus graciously allowed that we might go on being citizens anyway.)

Linker gives Neuhaus a bad press — anti-science, aggressive in arguing for religion in public life, and so on.  It’s unfair to judge from a single book, of course, especially a hostile book when the poor guy is on his deathbed, so I won’t say anything more.   Other contributors might have better-informed opinions.

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A Win for God?

Posted on January 7, 2009 by Bradlaugh

Sorry, I missed the whole “Godwin” thing. Could someone please explain? The only Godwin I know anything about is Mrs. Shelley’s Dad, of whom The Oxford Companion to English Literature records:  “He believed that men acted according to reason, that it was impossible to be rationally persuaded and not act accordingly, that reason taught benevolence, and that therefore rational creatures could live in harmony without laws and institutions.”  Plainly he didn’t get out much.  Is this him, or some other Godwin?

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Back again

Posted on January 7, 2009 by Bradlaugh

I apologize for the absence. I had an irate publisher banging on my door & had to finish something for him. OK, what’s going on?

Just reading back through posts here:

  • Ben Stein:  I’m still a bit sad about Ben. I really used to like his American Spectator diaries back in the 1970s.  Business-wise, I don’t think he’ll recover — he surely doesn’t deserve to — from those clips of him debating Peter Schiff that have been going around, Schiff right on  pretty much every point, Stein wrong, wrong, wrong. And I must say, this whole business of Jews cozying up to fundamentalist Christians just strikes me as creepy and, well … transparent. What would their grandparents say?
  • Did I see the name “Walter Olson” attached to a letter in The Economist recently, or was that a fig newton of my imagination?
  • Gods of the Copybook Headings:  Please go to this one on my spiffy new site, not that one on my crappy old site. I’m trying to get everything ported over so I can close down the old site, but it’s going at about the same speed as the conversion of minority voters to the Republican ticket.
  • Inaugural oath:  “So help me God” is just a flowery & traditional way to say “I really, really mean it.” I say it myself. To get rid of these things, you need to utterly overhaul the language, Nineteen Eighty-Four-style. Hands up anyone who really wants to do that? I thought not.
  • Our content:  Pass. And to hell with all these demands that we embark on some sort of system-building project. This is a blog, not Plato’s frickin’ Academy. I’m here mainly so I won’t annoy my religious colleagues over at NRO, so a typical Bradlaugh post on Secular Right will be something that would’ve ticked off Kathy Lopez. If that doesn’t suit you, don’t read ’em. This is blogging, the internet equivalent of sitting in a pub passing comments as the world goes by.

On the religion-and-society front, a pal in Australia sent me this.

Many ordinary Australians share the belief that religious faith is an indicator of morality, and it is  accepted wisdom that high rates of religious practice correlate with lower rates of crime, promiscuity and abortion.

However, a study published in the Journal of Religion and Society, an American academic journal, set out to test this hypothesis and found there is an inverse relationship between religiosity and public health and social stability. The study, “Cross-National Correlations of Quantifiable Societal Health with Popular Religiosity and Secularism in the Prosperous Democracies,” compared social indicators such as murder rates, abortion, suicide and teenage pregnancy using data from the International Social Survey Program, Gallup and other research bodies.

“In general,” writes the author, Gregory Paul, “higher rates of belief in and worship of a creator correlate with higher rates of homicide, juvenile and early adult mortality, STD infection rates, teen pregnancy and abortion in the prosperous democracies.”

This is stuff we’ve kicked around here on the site, but it’s interesting to see a formal study done. Interesting, too, to know that it’s being argued Down Under.

Apropos nothing much at all, the expression “Down Under” always brings to mind two things:  (1) The joke traditional in English Panto where a ribald emcee introduces some Australian act with [broad wink] “He’s very big Down Under.”  (2) The sentence that used to be listed in the Guinness Book of World Records (but apparently no longer is), as ending with the most possible consecutive prepositions. There’s a reference here:

The incumbent record was a sentence put into the mouth of a boy who didn’t want to be read excerpts from a book about Australia as a bedtime story:  “What did you bring that book that I don’t want to be read to from out of about ‘Down Under’ up for?”

Mark Brader (msb@sq.com — all this is to the best of his recollection; he didn’t save the letter, and doesn’t have access to the British editions) wrote to Guinness, asking:

“What did you say that the sentence with the most prepositions at the end was ‘What did you bring that book that I don’t want to be read to from out of about “Down Under” up for?’ for?  The preceding sentence has one more.”

Norris McWhirter replied, promising to include this improvement in the next British edition;   but actually it seems that Guinness, no doubt eventually realizing that this could be done recursively, dropped the category.

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Ben Stein: “…That’s where science leads you”

Posted on January 7, 2009 by Walter Olson

Andrew Sullivan’s readers pick, among their choices for Worst of 2008, an interview excerpt from lawyer/comedian/commentator Ben Stein that Bradlaugh, at NRO “Corner”, accurately described as “dreck” and “shameful” (Godwin alert):

Stein: When we just saw that man, I think it was Mr. Myers [i.e. biologist P.Z. Myers], talking about how great scientists were, I was thinking to myself the last time any of my relatives saw scientists telling them what to do they were telling them to go to the showers to get gassed … that was horrifying beyond words, and that’s where science — in my opinion, this is just an opinion — that’s where science leads you.

Crouch: That’s right.

Stein: …Love of God and compassion and empathy leads you to a very glorious place, and science leads you to killing people.

Crouch: Good word, good word.

Ben Stein is a big deal in conservative circles and gets invited to headline many events, perhaps in part because of the gravitas conferred by his status as a New York Times business columnist, though as I’ve tried on occasion to show at one of my other sites (and as financial bloggers Felix Salmon and Larry Ribstein show much more frequently and brilliantly than I) Stein’s views on business and economics are not really much more solidly informed than his views on Intelligent Design.

P.S. It will be difficult, but could we please avoid in the comments adding a proliferation of other Godwin violations to Stein’s own?

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